unnest_ordinality extension

The other day Josh Berkus was working on one of our clients and needed a fast way to unnest some arrays with ordinality, that is to have a row number attached to each element. The usual way that is recommended for doing this is to use subscripting with generate_series(), or calling unnest() in a plpgsql function and then returning the elements one by one. Both of these turned out to be not fast enough, and he was resorting to some fairly ugly code to get around the speed issue. I offered him a simple C function that would do this very quickly, and we're releasing it publicly today. In use on our client's site it has been extremely fast and simple to use.

example:

andrew# create extension unnest_ordinality;

    andrew=# select * from unnest_ordinality('{a,b,c,d,e,f,g}'::text[]);
     element_number | element 
    ----------------+---------
                  1 | a
                  2 | b
                  3 | c
                  4 | d
                  5 | e
                  6 | f
                  7 | g

The package is available on The PostgreSQL Experts Inc Github Repository and also on PGXN